PPC News Roundup: First Page Minimum Bids Increase

Rachel Poole details the latest paid search news and advice including an update on the effects of the SERPs’ changes, the switch from Bing Ads Campaign Analytics to UET, and new shopping product insights.

Now the dust has begun to settle, Searchengineland has reported on an increase in first-page minimum bids, taking data since the change and comparing it to the previous period in 2015.

According to the research, increases in minimum bids for first-page ads directly follows the SERPs changes made in February. It is possible, however, that some advertisers are increasing their bids in an attempt to get their paid ads back into play, where they fell out of the first-page results after the changes were made.

Where first-page minimums may have increased, top-of-page bids have decreased. This comes as no surprise as there are now more ad slots available at the top of the results pages. Having said that, top-of-page minimum bids are now slowly increasing, continuing to climb since the beginning of March.

The report also concluded that CPCs are seeing a slight increase, and bottom-of-page ads are, in fact, seeing more traffic than initially expected.

Making The Switch From Bing Ads Campaign Analytics To UET

If you’re still using Campaign Analytics to track conversions you may want to migrate over to UET. Bing is in the process of migrating all active Campaign Analytics goals to UET. The migration will start in May 2016 and be completed in October 2016.

Most of the transition process will be done by Bing. But marketers will need to replace Campaign Analytics tags on site with the brand new UET tag, and this should be done by October 2016.

Throughout the migration process Bing will not remove any data or replace any tags for you. Bing will instead map the Campaign Analytics tag to the new UET tag to ensure that none of your historic data is lost.

In the products tab you can now easily spot the status of your best performing products. This tool will help to identify the products that have stopped attracting traffic and conversions because they have been disapproved, excluded or are out of stock. This will inform bid adjustments for your top sellers and quickly inform you of any issues, or out of stock products that need to be removed from Shopping.

In February 2016, Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, stated that YouTube’s audience views hundreds of millions of hours each day.

Facebook’s metric of ‘a view’ is counted only after 3 seconds of play.

YouTube counts its ‘view’ after 30 seconds of the video being played.

YouTube has considered its performance according to number of hours watched, and not the amount of videos viewed.

Facebook caught up with this “hours watched” metric in 2016.

So which platform will give you the best value when it comes to video marketing? With the video experiment conducted, the same video with the same budgets used, was submitted to YouTube Ads and Facebook Video Ads. Demographic targeting was also the same across the platforms. And the results were as follows:

Key Takeaways

Facebook beats YouTube for impressions

YouTube has a higher engagement on quality time watched for its videos

Completed views are significantly higher within YouTube

Cost per Quality watched minute is cheaper on YouTube

In conclusion, set your KPIs before starting your video campaign. If you want to put your video in front of as many eyeballs as possible, you may opt for using Facebook. If you want to pay for quality watched time, YouTube is a better option.